Communal Gardens

The idea behind communal gardens is shared resources and shared relationships. Gardening does not have to be done alone. In fact, gardening is best done in the context of a community of people. Communal gardens allow people to pull their resources together to grow food more efficiently. Those resources may be land, time, seeds, gardening tools or manpower.

So what does a communal gardening look like and how does it work?  Communal gardening is when people partner together to grow certain foods either in one or several locations. For example, lets say there are three families that each want  to grow sweet corn. In order to grow sweet corn, because of the way it pollinates, you need to plant it in at least 4- to 6 rows. These rows would be about 4 to 6 feet wide total. The length of these rows would ideally be anywhere from 10 to 20 feet long. These dimensions would take up a lot of the gardening space in an average persons yard, leaving them less room to grow other vegetables.

Instead of each individual family growing corn in their yard, communal gardening looks something like this: one family offers a larger portion of the yard to grow corn for everyone, while the other families use their extra space left over from not growing corn in their yard to grow additional vegetables to make up for whatever the first family sacrificed to grow the corn. This way everyone gets the vegetables they need and in the amounts they want it. This can be done with other foods as well.  For example, one family can grow all the potatoes and one family can grow all the squash and zuchini etc.

Another approach to communal gardening would be for the three families to grow all of their food in one area: tilling, planting, weeding and harvesting as a team. This approach can save time and energy by taking labor intense activities like digging out potatoes and picking corn and consolidating them into blocks of time when the three families can combine their efforts and do it all at the same time.  This works especially well with foods that can be harvested at the same time like corn, potatoes, butternut squash and the like.

Communal gardening not only helps people save time, money and energy, it also helps build community. The three families do not necessarily have to know each other in order to do this kind of gardening. The group of families can be close friends or complete strangers. Either way, communal gardening works to bring people together for the common good. It teaches us to share, look out for each others needs and think creatively about community issues. When people begin to live in community, great things can happen. Communal gardens a great way to make this happen.